David Longstreet

Harry Truman (former President of the USA) once quipped something like, “I want a one handed economist because economist always say things like on the one hand things looked good, but on the other hand things don’t look so good.”

This is especially true with the latest economic figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the IT sector.

The information sector includes publishing, movies, broadcasting, telecommunications, and data processing and hosting, the Telco’s shed 2,600 jobs, down to 951,100, while data processing and hosting companies added 2,900 jobs, to 248,900. In the professional and business services sector, the IT-related segment is for companies that are involved in computer systems design and related services, and in this area there are nearly 1.44 million people employed, and in February the number of people employed in this area rose by 8,700.

Finally, management consulting and technical services – which often has an IT component, given the importance of computing to the running of any business – as a group shed 2,100 jobs last month. So… it is not all good new or all bad news.

I received and interesting email from Tony Bonn. Where he suggested that processes have economic value. Adam Smith argued a wealth of a nation is not based upon its amount of stored money or the total value of assets. Instead a countries wealth is based upon its ability to produce goods and services. Does this same concept hold true for an organization?

In the information age an organizations economic value is its ability to produce goods and services not just a summation of assets and cash. Of course physical assets and cash are necessary, but not as necessary as the processes the organizations utilizes. The argument goes like this, the better the process the more an organization can produce. Those organizations with the best processes in place are able to produce the highest value of goods and services. The process, the how, is more important in developing software than the physical assets used to create software.

It seems logical a certain amount of value needs to place on the processes of an organization. If a processes increases the book value of an organization it increases the stock value too.